The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

President Obama seems frustrated these days – lashing out emotionally, intensifying his rhetoric against money-makers, doubling down on his demagoguery, and claiming that heartless GOP rivals want dirty air, unsafe water, poisoned food, and no health care. Mr. Obama blames Congress for not enacting yet more of his destructive “stimulus” schemes, even as the CBO this week reiterated its prior estimate that Obama’s first stimulus scheme ($787 billion, February 2009) will have a net negative impact on GDP over the coming decade.

Mr. Obama says he’ll spend $1 billion on his coming campaign for re-election – gathered, no doubt, from the corporate “fat cats” he likes to denounce – and that thematically he’ll be running against a “do nothing" Congress. In fact, if Congress did nothing for Obama over the coming year, it would be doing him a favor.

More pathetic still has been Mr. Obama’s recent resort to blaming others – as usual, the innocents among us – for the abject failure of his own policies. For some inexplicable reason, he said in Orlando last September, Americans have “gotten a little soft” and “didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.” In late October he told a gathering in San Francisco that “we’ve lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.” Finally, at the APEC meeting last weekend Obama complained to an audience of American CEOs that “we’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades . . . We aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America.”

Mr. Obama’s use of the collective “we” is an attempt to soften what’s really a bullying, despicable insult – equivalent to this: “You much-vaunted money-makers, those I demonize, you aren’t working very hard, aren’t hiring enough, or earning enough to render to me the tax revenues I need.”

In just three years Mr. Obama has been such an inspiring leader, confidence-builder, political organizer, and policy-maker that he simultaneously faces a do-nothing Congress, a do-nothing business community, and a do-nothing economy. No wonder most Americans these days tell pollsters they're dissatisfied with his presidency.

Mr. Obama isn’t the first U.S. president to seek re-election by running against a “do nothing" Congress. Democrat Harry Truman did it in 1948 and beat a weak GOP candidate (New York governor Tom Dewey), albeit in a close vote. Yet unlike Truman, whose famed desktop sign declared “the buck stops here,” Obama prefers to pass the buck, to deny self-responsibility, and to blame others for his failings. At various times he has blamed the stagnant U.S. economy of 2009-2011 on President Bush, on the financial crisis of 2008, on the Japanese tsunami, the “Arab Spring,” the European debt crisis, the weather – and now, on otherwise productive Americans who’ve mysteriously become “soft,” “lazy,” “un-ambitious,” and “un-imaginative.”

At the same time, Obama’s administration demands still more taxes from top wealth-creators, blocks bank dividends, precludes Boeing from opening a new plant in South Carolina, stalls deep-water drilling in the Gulf, subsidizes corrupt loss-makers like Solyndra, and nixes the proposed Keystone Pipeline. Is it the case that rich taxpayers, bankers, jet-makers, and oil producers have suddenly become “lazy,” or instead that they simply refuse to keep slaving away for the privilege of being characterized as malefactors by the president? Why should wealth creators be more ambitious, work harder, or earn more profits, only to hand them over as tax revenues to Mr. Obama, so he can more easily pay the lavish bills he has rung up at the White House?

Mr. Obama has said “we’ve lost our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge,” but it’s surely not true that we’ve lost the ability to build them. If such things aren’t built anymore in part it’s because government now prefers to redistribute wealth than to help create it (by facilitating infrastructure investment), in part because it is over-indebted and simply can’t afford it, but primarily because environmentalists have erected legalized barriers to such creations. The greens want to remove existing bridges, dams, and factories - not build new ones. If Obama really wanted us to regain our “willingness” to build great things, he’d call off his vicious green dogs.

In blaming the deleterious effects of his own policies on Americans allegedly being “soft,” “lazy,” “un-ambitious,” and “un-imaginative,” Mr. Obama has had what I’d call his “malaise moment.” Recall President Carter’s limp speech in July 1979, nearly three years into his term, blaming the disastrous economy on Americans supposedly being in a psychological funk, or in what Mr. Carter called “a crisis of confidence.” Pundits dubbed it the “malaise” speech. “Malaise” is defined as “a condition of general bodily weakness or discomfort” or “a vague, unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness, or lethargy.” In his speech Carter said “our true problems are much deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, inflation or recession,” for “we are confronted with a moral and a spiritual crisis,” such that “all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.”

Mr. Carter said the U.S. economy was broken not because of his own policies but because of “a crisis of confidence that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” The problem, he said, is that Americans “have always believed in something called progress,” but that’s no longer feasible; now shortages were the norm, and “we can manage the short-term shortages more effectively,” but “there is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.” We should forget about pursuing or expecting prosperity, because “we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning” and that “piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Just like Carter’s anti-capitalist mentality, Obama’s also calls for “sacrifice” (as if that’s “noble”), instead of celebrating those among us who seek to live and gain by creating and exchanging new values, whether material or intangible. For Carter and Obama, those are “greedy” and “selfish” pursuits (true) which only deprive our lives of true meaning (false). As such, each man imposed regulatory-spending-tax-monetary regimes that stifled private-sector incentives, sapped entrepreneurial vitality, and chilled investor risk-taking.

If the Obama administration really cared about fostering a new willingness by America’s top wealth-creators to be more ambitious, work harder, and create a more prosperous economy, he’d be less hostile to wealth-creators and would rescind his wealth-destroying policies, while adopting truly pro-capitalist ones. He’d heed capitalism’s greatest economist, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), who said it best two centuries ago: